


that song you sing for the dead

by golden_geese



Category: Fallout 3, Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Teen Pregnancy, i tried to figure out the timeline as best i could bc its a little iffy between fo3 and fo4 haha, no sole survivor or any other kind of oc, non-graphic allusions to sex and violence, this is the single most tragic story in fallout
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 04:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16824727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/golden_geese/pseuds/golden_geese
Summary: from little lamplight to wandering the capital wasteland and the commonwealth. some moments from the lives of two kids who belong to each other.





	1. lucy

7 years old. Calmly, quietly, evenly, she holds his arm with her left hand and works on the wound with her right. He won't make eye contact. She can feel him trembling from the pain, feel his heart from under his pale skin-- she can feel his life in her hands. That, and sticky metallic dried blood-- with a smell so loud she can practically taste the iron. She holds her breath as she applies the last suture. Quietly, he thanks her. 

10 years old. He's nominated as mayor. She always knew he was different from the other boys. Something heats in her chest as she votes for him. A soft sadness edges around her when he wins-- he will be busy now, he won't have time for their jokes and chats. But she is wrong; regardless of how many kids need medical help or how much leadership stuff he has to do, they always find time for each other. Effortlessly, she starts to think she might have a crush on this boy with messy red hair and fire in his eyes.

14 years old. They talk quietly near the entrance of the caves, away from their sleeping friends. The candle flickers between them, a tickle of warmth on her toes as she sits with her knees to her chest. She can see the thick scar on his shoulder, sutured by a seven year old kid before he could bleed out. She wants to touch it, but she doesn't-- and a moment later, he shifts, and his shirt covers it once again. Eventually they get up to go to bed, all the laughs laughed and all the words spoken. Before they leave, though, she musters courage and takes him by the hand and kisses him. When she pulls away, he’s redder than she's ever seen him. Knowing she can fluster such a strong boy sends shivers down her spine and she finds herself thinking about it long after she should be asleep. Walking away from him has always felt surreal. Now, she realizes why.

15 years old. Neither of them have mentioned the fact that he has to leave in a week. Neither of them want to think about it. He holds his arm tight around her thin shoulders as they talk long into the night for the millionth time, tucked away into a secluded corner, electricity through her veins as his thumb brushes against her arm. She kisses him for the hundredth time, but this time his hands wander, and before she knows it they're doing a whole lot more than kissing each other. Every nerve in her body is awake against his skin. His breath is hot on the side of her neck, sending waves of static through her veins. Her lips part silently as their connection completes, her hands fisted around handfuls of his shirt. To both of them, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. Eventually they go to sleep. Neither of them brings it up. In a week, he is gone. A handful of months later she watches as a younger girl expertly stitches up a gash on a little boy’s knee. The kids will be okay, she realizes. She doesn't need to take care of them anymore. Maybe she can start taking care of herself instead. Maybe there is a reason this cave no longer feels like home. Maybe she can find that feeling again. Maybe people aren't meant to be alone-- maybe once you find your person it becomes an exposed nerve and the only thing to do is stick close to them and never let them go. Maybe, she reasons as she finds herself packing her bag and leaving before anyone can stop her. When she finds him, a look of relief washes over his face, softening his blue eyes. Mountains converge; oceans part. He greedily pulls her into his arms and she laughs against his shoulder at an invisible private joke. He takes her face in his hands and kisses her even though there are people staring. He tells her he's just left the army, that he thinks they should wander until they find the place they belong. She knows she belongs anywhere he is. Under stars and moonlight, she holds tight to his shoulders as they move against each other. When they finish they're both breathing heavy, and she watches the smooth planes of his chest rise and fall as he re-calibrates everything his life used to be into something brighter and better. She falls asleep to the steady rhythm of his pulse, a soft reminder that they are both alive and that right now ‘alive’ is a good thing to be.

16 years old. She knows it happened before she has proof. She feels it in her blood, in her footsteps against the forest floor, in the space between her eyelashes. She talks herself out of telling him a thousand times before she finally does. Instead of coming up with excuses and ways to go around it, he wraps his arms around her and tells her it will work, I will somehow plant a tree that grows caps, it will work, we will find a place, it will work, we can't abandon our own baby. When she feels the movement of a little somebody inside her months later, it reads more like determination than fear.  
When she meets their baby, she looks into his tiny round brown eyes and feels as if she's always known him. As if she's greeting an old friend. She holds him against her chest and buries her face in his soft hair. Her heart thumps against his tiny frame, swaddled in an old pillowcase his father found in the long-abandoned cabin. She feels a hand against her shoulder. From the day she patched up the red-haired boy in the caves years ago, this moment was written, closing any space that was ever between them. He looks at her like she has given him the entire world.

17 years old. Babies are so small, and continue to be small even as they grow-- small enough to softly nap against her chest after a long day, with her hand on his back as his father collects firewood a few feet away. From underneath the little boy’s pudgy baby skin she can feel his heartbeat. It seems to her that babies’ heartbeats should be permanently linked to their mothers’, that there was no room for dissonance in that kind of love. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches him looking at them as he picks up branches. 

18 years old. Pride swells around her heart as she watches him hold onto their son’s little hands while chubby feet amble around the floor. Their baby laughs the way only babies can, and it rises joy in both of his parents as he stumbles down after a record number of steps.

19 years old. They take turns carrying the baby and occasionally letting him walk a little, only with both his little hands held by his parents’. They watch him and smile at each other and talk and joke and laugh and walk in comfortable silence. When their little boy is asleep, they shroud each other in love, as if they've been challenged to put as much of their bodies together as possible. 

20 years old. Morning light floods the long-abandoned cabin they stumbled upon last night. As sleep untangles itself from her, she reaches for him and runs her hand across the thick scar on his shoulder. The baby is still asleep-- though he can hardly be called a baby anymore, he's three years old now. She wonders if someday, maybe sooner than later, there might be another little somebody within her. She wonders if, maybe, that little somebody has already taken root and she simply isn't aware of it yet. She does not know it is the last time she will wake up.


	2. r.j.

8 years old. He's never bled like this before, never hurt like this before, never felt so scared in his life. He clenches his jaw. Her fingers, careful and quick, patch him up. She deflates all the loud static swimming around his mind, softening the world around them as she finishes cleaning the wound. You'll be okay, she tells him. He believes her.

11 years old. They vote him as their leader even though he's younger under than some of them. He accepts the position with a determined grin, but inside he isn't sure. All he knows is he'll be better than the last mayor. All he knows is he will have to be careful to make the time to let her make fun of him, candle light flickering through their conversations. He is proud to have been nominated, but her vote means more to him than anyone else's. He almost has the foresight to realize this. Almost.

15 years old. He finds any excuse he can to touch her. Skin, hair, even though her clothes-- anything. He asks her to thumb wrestle so he can feel her pulse against his hand. He stares at her when she isn't looking, hungrily takes in her thick, dark hair, her shining brown eyes, her dimpled smile, her amber skin, her small hands as they work confidently. He has a thick, silvery scar on his shoulder, jagged, proof of his survival-- proof of the fact that she saved his life. He always liked it. Thought it made him look tough. As she kisses him for the first time, he realizes he likes it for a completely different reason.

16 years old. He clenches his jaw tight as he walks away from his home. He doesn't get far before he has to stop and center himself against an abandoned building. For a moment, he thinks he's going to puke. He feels worse than ever and it lingers for several days. He tries to drown it out with gunshots, but there are some things you can never outrun. Even as he waits to snipe someone from a roof, he thinks about the way her hands grabbed at his shoulders, the way her breasts felt pressed against his chest, the gasps out of her mouth as they moved against each other. He finds himself counting down the days until she turns sixteen too and leaves the caves forever. On her birthday he's going to wait nearby, he decides. He will not waste a second, he decides. She is missing from him. He never gets the chance to act out his big romantic gesture because she shows up five months shy of her sixteenth birthday. Because of course she does. It felt silly, she tells him, to wait around for something she could just seek out instead. He lies to her about what he's been doing because he feels like he has to. He doesn't know what disappointment would look like in her eyes, but he swore to himself long ago that he would never ever let himself find out. He kisses her and hugs her and touches her hair a million times to make up for every moment he wished he could back in the caves. He holds her tight and sleeps better than he has in months, lulled by the soft sound of her breathing.

17 years old. For days, he is scared he did something to upset her. For days, he wonders why she won’t look at him for more than a second, why she holds tight to the straps of her backpack as they walk, why she walks a tiny bit faster than usual. For days, he can feel the worlds riling underneath his tongue; I’m really fucking sorry, whatever it was I’ll never to it again, tell me what it was so I can _never do it again--_ and he feels another flavor of desperation too; that she is all he has, that he loves her more than anything, that she is his only family and he would do anything, anything, anything-- but when she finally tells him what’s been dragging on her mind it has nothing to do with her being angry at him, and he realizes after the mental fright he’d gone through that they can do this, that they can make this work, that they could make anything work. He holds her close and tells her so, whispers it softly into her hair. He tells her he loves her more than anything, anything, _anything._  
He catches their baby with shaky hands and blurred vision. It’s warm, it’s crying, it’s covered in-- he doesn’t even know what it’s covered in. He takes it to the bucket of water from the creek and cleans it off gently and wraps it in an old pillowcase he found in the abandoned cabin. He wants to cry when he looks at it, but instead he hands it to her, touches her shoulder as she buries her face in its dark hair. Exhausted, she sleeps for hours and hours that night-- he doesn’t, still shaken, holding the tiny fragile brown-eyed baby in his arms, watching moonlight across her face.

18 years old. It’s like magic, watching her care for their baby, watching her confident hands wrap him in blankets, clean his face, comfort him when he cries. It’s like she’s done it all her life, like it’s all she’s ever done. His hands have been uncertain since the moment the baby was born, but hers never were. He loves them both so much it rips at his chest, shoves at his ribs, squeezes at his lungs. He watches her even when he’s meant to be doing something else. 

19 years old. He holds onto their baby’s pudgy hands tightly as he learns to walk, his chest clenched up against the thought of his little boy falling on his face and hurting himself and bleeding and crying. He holds tight, though-- long ago he promised he would never learn what disappointment looked like on her face, and he renews the vow that very moment. She’s smiling, laughing, cheering them on-- he doesn’t mess up. He scoops the baby up before he can hurt himself. He smiles a little bit too.

20 years old. The baby babbles against his shoulder as he carries him. Reaches for his mother. Laughing, he hands the baby over to her-- and then, immediately, pudgy hands outstretch toward him. They pass the baby back and forth like this, laughing about how he can never decide who he wants to be held by. They let him walk occasionally, just for a little while at a time. He talks and talks and talks, filling the air with toddler giggles. 

21 years old. It’s a little weird to him to have sex when their sleeping toddler is nearby, but they do it anyway. She presses her mouth against his neck as they do, muffling the soft gasps. They fall asleep wrapped up in each other, tangled up in the warmth of it. He awakens to her tracing his scar, smiling at it a little bit. He smiles too. Moments later, he pulls himself out of their two sleeping bags zipped together and off the rickety bed. He crosses the floor of the abandoned cabin and picks up their little boy, who’s barely waking up. It is the last happy morning he will have for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> if u like this please leave a comment!! i read and reply to all of them and i can definitely write more fics about these two (or deacon tbh) if anyone is interested!!!! follow me on tumblr: wiildheart (main) golden-geese (it's always sunny in philadelphia blog)


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